Project Dogwaffle - PD Artist 8.2

Details

PD Artist 8.2 is a lite version of Project Dogwaffle. Professional, without the animation component. It is a digital painting program for PC, made to be fast and fun, loaded with an amazing array of features. Sure, it lacks perhaps one or two items you can find elsewhere, but there's plenty of other tools and features to make up for it, and you won't go broke buying this one. A full description of the product and updates, galleries and tutorials can be found at http://www.thebest3d.com/pda - we encourage you to visit regularly and subscribe to the newsletter, to be up to date on free updates.

PD Artist is a subset of PD Howler (PD Pro Howler edition), specifically version 8, but without the animation or video tools. The result: a lean, mean painting machine that's even more affordable. PD Artist 8 is built on PD Artist 8.2c and powered by PD Pro 8 - the same super-fast core engine as the one used in PD Pro 8 and thus benefits from interface improvements, multi-threading, SSE2 acceleration, speed enhancements and other optimizations found there. It runs best on Windows 8 and 7, but still also can work on Vista and XP with SP3.

All of the features (minus the majority of animation/video tools) of PD Pro 8 are intact. However, animated brushes are still included! You can still load an existing AVI video clip or an image sequence straight into the custom animated brush system in order to then 'paint' it over your artwork!

PD Artist 8 is based on the same engine as PD Pro Howler 8. If you can't afford PD Howler (PD Pro Howler), or if you just really don't need or care for animations or video and don't want to pay extra for such features that you wouldn't be using, then PD Artist is the better tool for you.

What's Included and Features

This is the first release of the Artist edition to support the GPU, when available. The 3D Designer, Mandelbrot fractal and Bokeh blur use the GPU if the grahics chip is adequate, DirectX11 supported and running on Windows 7 or Windows 8. With earlier versions of Windows (XP SP3 and Vista), GPU is disabled. Multithreading is however enabled too, so you can potentially reach very high performance levels there too.

PD Artist (also known as PD Pro (or Project Dogwaffle Professional) Artist edition, is the lighter counterpart to PD Howler. PD Artist does not allow creating animations or working with video, except that you can still load AVI files or image sequences into animated brushes, and paint with them on a single still image. With PD Howler, you can also work with animations, including the image stabilizer and motion prediction module.

PD Artist is made for painting. You can use it for image editing too. It does support layers (but not opaque layers except when dedicating a color such pink and enabling the layer blending mode such as Magic Pink. There are dozens of other layer blending modes, and a ton of tools and brushes.

PD Artist includes several types of brushes, such as small algorithmically generated antialiased brushes, fine liners, oils, airbrushes, translucent watercolors with pigment lifting, particle brushes for grass and shrubbery, fireworks and lots more, rules based particle brushes for entire trees in a single brushe stroke, complete with 3D depth.

The 3D Designer is great for creating landscapes based on colored elevation maps. You can also add lens flares and other visual effects. This is great for post work, such as if you forgot to enable lens flares and reflections during your 3D rendering which took hours to complete, and you just don't have the time to re-render it all. SImply use Dogwaffle to add the special effects you desire.

PD Artist also includes numerous filters for many traditional image transmations, plus a great number of not-so-traditional effects.

If you purchase this product, it will take you years to discover and learn to use all its features, but don't be discouraged - it's a good thing: PD Artist is that loaded with so many features. There is even another "Paint program within the Paint program" - we call it Penny paint. If you draw Manga and Anime, or other types of line art - this is a great companion.

PD Artist does of course support the tablet pressure, and with some brushes (such as Bristle brushes) also the angle when using a Wacom Intuos with angle detection pen.

A feature list can be found here for the Howler edition (simply ignore the animation portions for the Artist edition): http://www.thebest3d.com/howler/the-dogwaffle-main-feature-list.html